


Split

by double_negative



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Angst, Emetophobia, Fire, Gen, Headcanon, Insanity, Mind Meld, Mindfuck, Mindwiping, Missing Scene, Self-Harm, Self-Harm by fire, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-27 07:22:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12076275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/double_negative/pseuds/double_negative
Summary: He remembers sometimes.He wonders if he'll ever forget.





	Split

**Author's Note:**

> I was very sick just 5 hours ago and I thought I would die. In the middle of the night I woke up to write this. Needless to say I am a little delirious and disturbed. My mouth still tastes like vomit. Everything tastes like vomit.

_Calling all comas, prisoner on the loose._  
_Description: a spitting image of me_  
_Except for the heart-shaped hole where the hope runs out_

* * *

 Sometimes he remembers all the reasons he became like this. The day he lost the imagination of a child, the ability to conjure giant beings of fire, torching everything around and inside him. Burning every bad feeling, every bad memory with the metaphorical fire, roaring just as loud as a literal one, scorching his enemies, boiling the blood in their veins, blistering their skin until it cracks open, watching their bodies erupt into flames as fiery as his red hair. He lost even that.

He remembers thinking it was just another job. Mindless by this point, go in, act like an asshole who owns the place, read someone's mind to stupidly incapable people like he's reading a book for preschoolers, word by word spelled out, connect the dots, color by number, ruin everybodys day, still get paid for some reason with the amounts of money he'll never know what to spend on, come back to an empty house and burn out every thought about the past, every twitching desire for something more, something genuine, someone else, until the flames dancing on his scarred skin, not hurting anything except for his mind, set off the fire alarm. Some days as the blaring sound of it tears him out of his focused trance, the flames go deeper on accident, because he's too startled for precise control and when it eats as his flesh, he feels like he's truly clean, truly redeemed and forgiven. Pain works better than fire on its own, but he knows better than to indulge that urge. He knows, every new scar is a metaphor for his deteriorating mind, he knows that once he starts, he will never stop, setting himself ablaze until there's nothing left but ash. He's too smart for that and besides, he's not suicidal. Never allowed himself to be.

He remembers approaching it just like anything else. With the overconfidence and flair of someone who's too advanced for the entire world around them, someone who learned to fly while everyone around them is yet to walk on their own two feet. He remembers realising that all this time he was so very wrong. Reading a mind is not like reading a book at all. Reading a mind is like inviting stranger into your house. If they bear enough ill will, you will wind up dead and it would be entirely your own fault.

He dives deeper and deeper, but nothing comes up, the emptiness ringing through his entire being, actual desires and emotions and thoughts concealed under a layer and layer of nothing. He has seen that technique, but he never met anyone with so many shields, so he wonders if it's even voluntary, intentional. He wonders if his own mind feels like this, layers and layers of nothing but smoldering ash.

He proceeds, going lower and lower until he realises, he's being lured, but it's too late to turn back. Everything hits him at once and he feels his self splintering into a myriad of pieces, blinding him, filling his ears with a deafening high-pitch ringing. With what's still left in him, he remembers feeling that way once, a memory so vague and fuzzy, it becomes more transparent the more he tries to grasp at it. Black fabric swaying in the wind around him, a young boy with slicked back light hair, the patter of tropical rain, wet bare feet, a grenade, too close.

Everything is spinning, dizzyingly real despite being in someone elses head. Everything is colors and feelings and sounds all at once, all so much he feels like he's lost of all of his senses.

He clutches at the pieces of his own psyche, but it's like trying to catch knives with your bare hands, he's no longer a psychic that can do anything he puts his mind too, he's empty and scared and powerless, so he tries to catch the falling pieces and they cut away at his flesh, smearing everything with blood, his blood, and he's never seen so much of it outside of his body, he's for some reason sure of it and it feels disgusting, sticky and moist at the same time and he is sickened to the core. He feels like vomiting and he does, forgetting he's still wearing his mask, even inside someone's head, the sharp smell of bile burns his nostrils, and he tears at the mask mindlessly, claws at the straps until it's off and the brain around him becomes even louder, to the point of it being physically painful.

He tries to steady himself, find some kind of an anchor, a point of reference, so that he can at least return, but everything he grasps at belongs to another person, every shard and sliver and piece so vile and repugnant. This man's thoughts are filled with acts of violence so horrific he's terrified and it's the only thing that keeps his astral body still intact, the fear of relatability, the terror of knowing that it's not his memories, not his thoughts, not his desires, but he's done something similar enough that if he isn't careful, they could pass as his own.

He looks and he looks unable to find anything that was him before, anything that feels right until he comes upon one particular shred of information. It's a small scrap, a singular thought, short and empty of all feeling attached to it, but he still grips at it until his fingers hurt, because it's his, his own, the only one. As the gruesome landscapes unfold around him, his knuckles go white and bloodless clutching at that single sentence.

_I'm not like him because Eli has never called me a monster._

Who even is Eli?

He's not sure. He feels like he wants to know, but he knows he never will unless he pulls himself together. So the next question comes and with it the realisation of his own emptiness dawning on him.

_Who was me?_

* * *

_Watching the water give in_  
_As I go down the drain, I appear missing now_  
_I go missing, no longer exist_  
_One day, I hope, I'm someone you'd miss_

* * *

When he wakes up again, the first thing he asks for is a mirror. He was never vain, but he needs proof that he put himself together back right, that his body, his face still look the same, that they are him. What he finds doesn't please him and his nurse's heart stops at his command, blood spurting out of her mouth. He knows it's probably not her fault, but he's angry. He has never been that angry in his entire life. He feels like tearing things apart, setting them ablaze until the whole world around him is a scorched pile of coal, dripping in melted steel and burning fat. He realises it's probably not the best idea while he's still not sure what happened to him. He's not even sure he's capable of such a feat anymore.

The mirror shatters into hundreds of pieces, each one displaying his reflection even more clearly. They cut open his head. A scar wraps around his forehead, wound stitched up so poorly he knows they weren't expecting him to wake up. They thought him braindead, probably, the most powerful psychic in the world, the only one worth hiring, so they cut open his head to poke and prod at his brain, to find out how it works, to rip his secrets away from him. They branded his flesh with numbers and lines, just another experiment, just another test subject to them. This is what he fought to come back to?

He's thinner than he remembers, paler. Like a ghost of himself. His hair is missing and his eyes seem to have changed, but he can't place the difference. When the second nurse stops screaming in terror at finding a corpse in his hospital room, he asks her for a glass of water and his mask. When she refuses him, still hysterical, he makes her do it, pleasantly surprised that the power is still there too. It feels wrong this time for some reason, though, wearing anothers body like a suit. He was never one to second-guess himself or ponder morals, so he chalks the discomfort up to being out of touch with his abilities for... for what, exactly? Days? Months? Years? He pokes around the nurse's brain to find a date and it's not a pleasing discovery either. He's been out of commission for 5 months.

Eli must have been worried. Wait. Who's...

It all comes crashing down within a split second. He's not a child anymore, not even a teenager, he's in his thirties and he made himself forget. He burned and burned and burned until there was nothing but ash, but putting himself back together made the old wounds bleed again, made his flesh feel raw, every feeling he's once had cramming itself back into his head at once.

Eli was his only friend. Eli was his, so close, so real, like they were one person, two disturbed minds melting together to make a single functional one. A simple memory of something Eli said was enough to anchor him, to bring him back. Eli was probably waiting for him somewhere, but then again, he remembers leaving him. He remembers hiding and ignoring and setting himself ablaze until it made him forget how stupidly vulnerable and open he was. Eli would never want him back. But does it matter when he can rewrite anyone's mind in a blink of an eye?

He looks into a mirror once again, seeing hundreds of him, hiding behind the tinted lenses and rubber of a gas mask. It's more familiar like this. He almost feels like himself again. Maybe Eli would help him recover the missing pieces. Whether he wants it or not. That, at least, is a start.

* * *

  _Dancing on wire, both ends are on fire, cut me loose_  
_Nowhere to run, no more room to pretend_

* * *

After he retrieves his medical records and papers detailing the experiments done on him, he torches the place to the ground, surprised to find that his power is barely enough to engulf a single building in flames. Still, the military hospital burns nicely and he has no regrets.

The anger he felt when he woke up never subsides.

He's no longer even able to realise that it's not his own.

Eli is delighted, but he's also hurt and very, very afraid. He has a different name now, so Mantis makes one up for himself too.

They are not friends anymore, but sometimes, Mantis gets to forget about it. He was always good at forgetting that which wasn't convenient to him, except at the times when he remembered it again. He asks ~~Eli~~ Liquid about the things that happened in the past and he doesn't even need to hear his answer, he can read Liquid as well as if Liquid's thoughts were still his own.

He wonders if Liquid could hear him too, absentmindedly picking at his brain, the grief and sorrow he could never place, the bitter taste of betrayal he knows too well.

He wonders what has changed so much that they became so different, so distant.

He will never realised that it was Tretij who Liquid wanted to see and that it was Mantis who came back.

* * *

_I've fallen through_

**Author's Note:**

> The lyrics are from Queens Of The Stone Age "I Appear Missing". It's a very Mantis song to me, also very dear to my heart, so go listen to it. I left the "love" part of the song because it's not a liquidmantis fic, but still I feel like this song fits their relationship.  
> "It's only falling in love because you hit the ground"
> 
> Apparently I just love dreamscape/coma fics. Also I love to torture myself, but hey, I started to feel better while I was writing this. Only some things taste like vomit now.


End file.
